


Araneomorphae

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [15]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Ignoring comic canon AND movie canon, Red Room (Marvel), Reproductive Coercion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23836750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: Natasha Romanov lied. She has a child.
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Kudos: 5





	Araneomorphae

Natasha tells Bruce she can never have children. That is not a lie, she reminds herself, it is only an omission. It is the truth, but not full truth:  the full truth is that she can never have children  _again_ .

Black Widow had a child. The Red Room recruits some of its operatives, but it prefers to raise them from birth, and throwing away the genetic stock of their most capable spies would be wasteful. The Red Room cannot abide waste. The best operatives are bred - if they can’t be spared for a few months to carry the pregnancy, a surrogate is used.  Natasha spent a few hours on an operating table, she was briefed about the procedure afterwards. She didn’t think much of it at the time, she was a good loyal soldier, and all of her belonged to the cause, body and soul.  Natasha  belonged to the Red Room, Natasha could not have children, and instead, the Red Room had what should have been Natasha’s child, a little daughter she  has only seen in passing, among the other infants in the creche.

It was normal and natural to have a kid and then give it up on command, it wasn’t the worst thing the Red Room had asked of her, not by far. But long after she broke free from the Red Room, after she started working for SHIELD, she realised there was a child, a little girl she had abandoned to go through everything she herself had gone through, or worse. A child raised only for deceit and murder. Natasha holds on to a cowardly and practical hope that the child is already dead, because the alternative is too horrible to consider.

(The child is not dead. The child defeats grown men in hand-to-hand combat, handles guns and knives with ease, deploys poison like a pro. She speaks a dozen languages and lies like she was born to do it - because she was. Most of her missions are recon, but her kill count still reaches the double digits when she’s twelve. She isn’t proud of that, because a blade cannot be proud of its sharpness or a bullet of its speed. One the job she looks small, harmless and sweet, an innocent little girl, and her handlers make sure she uses that to her advantage. She wears pigtails and  frilly skirts , chatters on her smartphone in the tones of an excited middle schooler planning a sleepover, as she scopes out the security system of another  building where she cannot afford to leave witnesses. Off the job, she’s silent, a drab ghost of a girl pushing through training, eating, sleeping, waiting. She has no name, after all, answering to a name is a weakness when you need to spend time in deep cover. Her handlers assigned her the codename Recluse. If she ever meets her mother, they won’t be fighting on the same side.)

**Author's Note:**

> You can probably tell that I didn’t like the reveal of Natasha’s backstory in Age of Ultron. I mean a woman going through forced sterilisation, and experiencing that trauma and that permanent bodily change as something that makes her less human and more monstrous - that could technically still make a good story, but I felt that it was written without care. Like the backstory was just thrown in there as an afterthought, without considering how the specific character with her specific characterisation would experience and express it.  
> But the other reason I disliked the Infertility Reveal is that I’m a born nitpicker and my inner script doctor says I could do better. Or worse, in this case. If we’re going to centre a woman’s characterisation around loss of reproductive choice, in order to create a parallel with a man whose mistake created an entity within himself that is dangerously out of his control, there is an obvious way to go with this.


End file.
